“Hello, hello!” called out a pleasant voice.

Andy Waters looked up and saw his new neighbor, Francis Frame.

“Hello, yourself,” he shouted cheerfully, as he fastened on his roller skates. “Want to go skating, Francis?”

“I can’t. I lost my roller skates last fall, and mother says she can’t afford to buy me another pair just now.”

Andy looked at his neighbor’s long legs. They were just the right kind, he thought, to make a fast skater.

“That’s hard luck, Francis, because if you had some roller-skates, maybe you could be in our skating relay race (接力赛) next Saturday.”

“Oh! Don’t I wish I had some skates!” cried Francis.

“I have to go for the training now but I can let you use my skates sometime when I am not using them.” Andy said bye to Francis.

When Andy skated slowly toward the end of the block, he thought about Francis Frame. Francis hadn’t lived in the block very long, and none of the other boys knew him. So the new boy was left to himself a great deal, and must often be very lonely.

“Yes,” said Andy to himself, “it certainly is a pity about Francis! I ought to do something about it.”

As he skated to the vacant lot where they usually trained and raced, he met the captain of his team, a large boy called Buddy Bowers. “I stopped for a few moments to talk to my new neighbor,” said Andy. “don’t you think we could use another boy on our team for the race? That new boy, Francis Frame, I mean?”

“We just can’t do it. The other team wouldn’t let us take on an extra boy.” Buddy refused.

Soon the training began and Andy practiced very hard, for his heart was set on having his team win the race. Still, he couldn’t help knowing that his short legs kept him from being a fast skater. On the way home, Andy thought of a way to help his team win as well as help Francis Frame — he could pretend to be sick on the racing day and have Francis take his place!

Thinking of this, he raced to the home of his new neighbor.

Finally came the racing day, and Andy and Francis showed up together.

From an early age, Patti Wilson was told that she was an epileptic (癫痫患者). However, she was a lively and enthusiastic girl, looking at her illness as simply “an inconvenience”. She never focused on what she had lost, but on what she had left. One day, Patti said to her father, who was a morning jogger, “Daddy, I’d really love to run with you every day, but I’m afraid I’ll have an epileptic fit.”

Her father told her, “Don’t worry, my girl. I know how to handle it! Let’s start running then!”

It was a wonderful experience for the father and daughter to run together every day. After a few weeks, the ambitious girl told her father, “Daddy, What I’d really love to do is to break the world’s long-distance running record for women.” The father checked the Guinness Book of World Records and found that the farthest any woman had run was 80miles.

That year, she completed her run to San Francisco, which is a distance of 400 miles. She was wearing a T-shirt, reading, “I Love Epileptics”. Her father ran every mile at her side, and her mom, a nurse, followed in a motor home behind them in case anything went wrong. But nothing happened at all while she was running.

As a senior high school student, Patti announced that she was determined to run from her hometown up to the White House, which is a distance of more than 3000 miles away. Her classmates got behind her. They built a giant poster that read, “Run, Patti, Run!” This has since become her motto and the title of a book she later has written.

On her second marathon in Portland, she had her foot injured.

Half a year later, Patti ran in Washington and finally shook the hand of the President.

On a bright Saturday, my peaceful lunchtime was suddenly interrupted when my dad surprised me with an unplanned idea. I couldn’t hide my annoyance as what was supposed to be a relaxing Saturday turned into a day focused on football — a sport I wasn’t very excited about.

Many of my friends loved sports, while I preferred to find comfort in the pages of a good book rather than run around on a football court. My lack of interest resulted in average performance on the team, and I often felt like I was a problem for both my coach and teammates.

Things changed last week when our coach announced a coming match against the champions scheduled for a month later. The realization that this important game would have a big audience only made me more anxious. The fear of possibly letting down the team weighed on me.

Determined to make a positive impact, I decided to practice hard every day. My motivation came from wanting to help the team and to overcome the self-doubt affecting my performance.

As the match day approached, my teammates seemed unsure about including me in the lineup (阵容). I wouldn’t have minded sitting out, but the situations were different. With one player short, they reluctantly (不情愿地) included me, and The Thunder Strikers, our team, stepped onto the field to enjoy cheers from the crowd.

The pressure was intense. The game started, and within the ten minutes, I received a warning. Before long, the referee showed me a second yellow card, forcing me to leave the field. When I got back into the game, the score was tied, and the next goal would decide the winner.

As the ball came toward me, I felt a bit scared. My teammates seemed tired, and the other team really wanted to win. With great courage, I kicked the ball. The opponents (对手), maybe not expecting much from me because of my earlier struggles, were surprised when the ball went past the goalkeeper.

The Thunder Strikers won!

After this win, football became different for me.

9 . The International Federation of Pickleball, with 60 member countries and counties, is working to make sure pickleball will be part of the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.     1    

“Pickleball comes from tennis, badminton and table tennis,” says Hope Tolley, managing director of USA Pickleball.       2     And it uses square paddles (球拍) and a small plastic ball that’s similar in size to a tennis ball, but much lighter.

Unlike tennis, you can score only when it’s your turn to serve. What you should do is keep the ball in the air, and if your opponent(called the receiver)fails to return the ball over the net, you get the point.     3     If not, you’ll end up with a shot that fails to reach the net. Matches can be played in doubles or singles, and games are played to 11 points.

    4     Because the game can vary the intensity-going all out or taking a slower pace-pickleball suits professional athletes and beginners alike. It’s a great workout and it’s a low-influence sport, so it’s easy on players’ joints (关节).

People who are really into the sport can join tournaments at various levels. The first World Pickleball Games will be held next summer in Austin, Texas.     5    

10 . The rate of childhood obesity in the U.S. has tripled over the past 50 years. But what this trend means for children’s long-term health, and what to do about it (if anything), is not so clear.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) made waves this year by recommending that doctors put obese kids as young as two years old on intensive, family-oriented lifestyle and behavior plans.     1     This advice marks a shift from the organization’s previous stance of “watch and wait,” and it reflects the AAP’s belief that obesity is a disease and the group’s adoption of a more proactive position on childhood obesity.

Yet the lifestyle programs the AAP recommends are expensive, inaccessible to most children and hard to maintain — and the guidelines acknowledge these barriers. Few weight-loss drugs have been approved for older children, although many are used off-label.     2     And surgery, while becoming more common, has inherent risks and few long-term safety data — it could, for instance, cause nutritional deficits in growing children. Furthermore, it’s not clear whether interventions in youngsters help to improve health or merely add to the stigma overweight kids face from a fat-phobic society. This stigma can lead to mental health problems and eating disorders.

Rather than fixating on numbers on a scale, the U.S. and countries with similar trends should focus on an underlying truth: we need to invest in more and safer places for children to play where they can move and run around, climb and jump, ride and skate.

    3    In 2020 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found, unsurprisingly, that kids’ sports participation increases with their parents’ incomes: about 70 percent of kids whose families earn more than $105,000 a year participate in sports, but only 51 percent of middle-class kids and 31 percent of children at or below the poverty line do. This disparity hurts people of color the most. More than 60 percent of white children, for instance, participate in athletics, but only 42 percent of Black children and 47 percent of Hispanic children do. Experts blame these problems on the privatization of sports — as public investment in school-based athletics dwindles, expensive private leagues have grown, leaving many kids out.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, children between ages six and 17 should get at least an hour of moderate to intense physical activity every day. Yet only 21 to 28 percent of U.S. kids meet this target, two government-sponsored surveys found. The nonprofit Active Healthy Kids Global Alliance evaluates physical activity in American children, and in 2022 the group gave the U.S. a grade of D–.

Why is it so hard to get kids moving? In addition to fewer opportunities at school, researchers cite increased screen time, changing norms around letting kids play outdoors unsupervised, and a lack of safe places for them to play outside the home.

New York City, for example, had 2,067 public playgrounds as of 2019 — a “meager” amount for its large population, according to a report from the city comptroller — and inspectors found hazardous equipment at one quarter of them. In Los Angeles in 2015, only 33 percent of youths lived within walking distance of a park, according to the L.A. Neighborhood Land Trust. Lower-income neighborhoods tend to have the fewest public play spaces, despite often having a high population density.     4    

Kids everywhere need more places to play: trails, skate parks and climbing walls, gardens and ball fields, bike paths and basketball courts. Vigorous public funding to build and keep up these areas is crucial, but other options such as shared-use agreements can make unused spaces available to the public.